A documentary about Paul Otlet, often considered the father of information management, narrated by W. Boyd Rayward, his biographer.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s Otlet pioneered the field of what we today call information science, but what he called documentation. A hundred years before the development of the Internet, Otlet used terms like web of knowledge, link, and knowledge network to describe his vision for a central repository of all human knowledge.

In English and French. Produced for Dutch television in 1998.


This movie is part of the collection: Community Video

Production Company: Noorederlicht
Audio/Visual: sound, color
Keywords: otlet; mundaneum; rayward; belgium; documentation; internet

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Reviewer: txibi - - April 18, 2009
Subject: Great documentary
Great documentary; i´d like to know if there´s any way we can get subtitles from this film, we´d like to show it in our class for spanish information science students

Reviewer: HazQuest - - June 21, 2008
Subject: good info
good info, needs subs

Reviewer: mbrownstone - - July 30, 2006
Subject: Fabulous introduction to pre-digital information classification
Thank you. I will use this video in my digital age 8th grade class in September. It will give the students a visual appreciation of pre-digital classification and organization of information. This is the first video in the archive that I have viewed. How did I get here? Through no planned organization of information, but by stumbling around the digital flea market of the Internet--just like I used to browse the neat sliding drawers of the library card catalog.